Sir Peter Snell’s Mile World Record Recognized by WA

Jan. 27, 2022 — Sixty years ago today, Peter Snell set his first world mile record with 3:54.4 at Cook’s Garden in Wanganui, New Zealand (*Watch the footage of the race HERE). World Athletics (WA) awards the WA Heritage Plaque posthumously to Sir Peter Snell (Legend) and Cook’s Garden (Landmark). Here is a great article written by WA (PETER SNELL). Here’s an excerpt from this article:

Towards the end of his schooling he found that his powerful physique better suited him to running and his successes brought him into the orbit of Lydiard, a former New Zealand marathon champion, who persuaded him that a weekly training regime of 100 miles — including a Sunday 22 miler, as well as hill running and interval training — would equip him with the stamina base required to become a world-class 800m runner. “I came to the conclusion that it was all about the conditioning,” Snell told Runner’s World. “Spend as much time as you can on the conditioning and you’ll eventually get yourself into, as Lydiard liked to say, a ‘tireless state’. “You could run the 22-mile course and feel like you could go out the next day and do it again. Once you got there, it was a very heady feeling. You could do a great volume of training, get your intervals down to race pace, and do faster than race pace.”

Snell would go on to set 2 more world records (800m and 880 yards) a week later in Christchurch. His 800m record still stands as New Zealand’s national record. Here’s my previous blog on “Magical Week”. Congratulations, Sir Peter Snell!! — Nobby Hashizume